Affective Citizenship and The Cultural Discourse of Illegality

In thinking about the concept of “illegality,” I’m most interested in its cultural power outside of, but also in relation to, the law (Lowe). While “illegality” is certainly the determining condition of citizenship in that the exclusion of certain groups is what gives citizenship meaning, national involvement also comes into being in ways distinct from the question of legal status and political rights. (I am thinking here with a loose inspiration by and intellectual debt to the concept of “affective citizenship,” or the development of emotional and social affinity to a particular place or national community, discussed by many scholars, which I encountered specifically in reading Angela P. Harris’ article “Loving Before and After the Law” [76 Fordham L. Rev. 2821, 2008] in a previous class.) Illegality as a cultural discourse derives its power from law, and its cultural effect then helps to legitimize the violence of immigration policy. As Lisa Lowe frames it, the practice of designating subjects as legal or illegal is a technology “through which the liberal state discriminates, surveys, and produces immigrant identities” as culturally other and not belonging (Lowe 140). However, despite this social denigration on the basis of legal status, racialized immigrant communities still seek inclusion and “mak[e] claims of belonging…[on] society” (Ngai 2-3), primarily, I think, through the development of collective affective structures. In the context of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants to the U.S., illegality is a hybrid of law and orientalist cultural descriptions (Lowe 133) which treats Asian people as perpetual foreigners such that they are socially “illegal” even when naturalized or born citizens (Lowe 134, 135). “Illegality,” in culture, seems to be a question of legibility, or whether or not an individual is properly aligned with dominant cultural norms. Against this, Asian people’s construction of affective bonds with and through an idea of “Americanness” is a potent form of resistance through which they claim a place for themselves in this country. Together, they construct a felt truth of their particularized belonging.    

Placed in conjunction with Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, it becomes clear that the key forms of affective resistance against “illegality” come about through the family and the self-understanding implicit in heritage. Toward the end of the book, the unnamed brother fighting in Vietnam says that his security clearance proved that “the family was really American, not precariously American but super-American” (Kingston 299, my emphases). He sees this event as forgiving all of his ancestors’ “illegal” acts—from unlawful entry to crimes to communist affiliations. Reading the implicit but unspoken grounding of this belief, the brother’s statement confirms that “illegality” is a means for negatively evaluating the whole of immigrant histories and the emotional fabric of people’s subjectivities. His understanding of his family’s past and what it means to be “super-American” is a particular expression of desire. That is, their precarious history was an expression of affective citizenship, a pursuit of a particular future by any means, and when constructing his sense of self in relation to that history, this brother’s desire is to both belong and not be a target of discursive violence that claims otherwise. While the family followed throughout the book has clearly built its own forms of belonging, the brother’s reading of the security status is perhaps misled in terms of how others might still treat them. The legal confirmation of citizenship might not necessarily influence their constantly reinforced nonbelonging at the level of culture.

In this sense, “illegality," as citizenship's constitutive underside, fixes the effect of legal citizenship in a particular way. Being designated as "illegal" influences cultural exclusion, but being legal is unlikely to change the social condition of being “precariously American.” This is the case because, in addition to being a legally constructed fact, “illegality” is also a means for affixing and actualizing social death. Thus, this cultural discourse makes reference to the law, but can operate independently of it. “Illegality” as social death is so powerful because it mimetically reproduces a force of declaration much like that of the law, serving as a means by which particular subjects are written out of existence.